The Question

There have been an increasing number of people who pursue new life style of working, communicating, and playing games through smartphone to the extent of emerging consumer group who “starts a day with smartphone and wraps up with smartphone”.

In 2010, the number of smart-phone was 1.72 billion with an annual growth rate of 23.8%. Until 2015, this number will increase to 2.5 billion. There are hundreds of thousands of applications available in smart-phone.

Recent applications of smart-phone are used for everything from entertainment to tracking social networking to reading a book. Because of hundreds of thousands of applications, people can easily download and install applications. However, they use only a few applications instead all downloaded applications.

This study proposed an integrated theoretical framework of Smartphone Applications’ acceptance and intention to use based mainly on the technology acceptance model (TAM). The objectives of the study were to analyze the relationship of Smartphone users’ intention to use Smartphone Apps with selected constructs such as their perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived credibility, and to develop a general linear structural model of Acceptance of Smartphone Apps that would provide application developers with implications for better acceptance of their applications.

The objectives of this study are three-fold :

1. To propose an integrated theoretical framework of Smartphone Applications’ acceptance and intention to use based mainly on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).
2. To identify the key determinants in deciding purchase of Smartphone applications and establish their order of importance.
3. To analyze the usage pattern of Smartphone apps and to classify the users into different groups based on their usage of apps and factors they consider during purchase of apps.